As Red Sox continue putting something together, they leave a team that never quite did behind (2024)

Red Sox

What to think of the Red Sox, who are playing some of their best baseball of the season right now.

By Jon Couture

June 21, 2024

COMMENTARY

The Red Sox and the Mets have been the best teams in baseball since two Saturdays ago, each winning eight of 10. It’s a reminder of, if nothing else, the sheer scope of a baseball season and its capacity for twists, turns, and dead ends.

Two Saturdays ago, the Red Sox were losing back-to-back games to the White Sox and the Mets had yet to embrace Grimace as their savior. Look at ’em now! Trying to strain the mind back that far coats the whole thing in the 1950s patina Fox broke out on Thursday night from Rickwood Field.

The same day that happens, NESN announces it’s rolling out alternative game broadcasts with content creators, gambling analysts, and ketchup enthusiast Jared Carrabis. The world contains multitudes.

Though their seasons are not the same, the Red Sox and Mets each find themselves in the same spot on Friday morning — a game out of a wild-card position with about nine 10-game stretches yet to play. Nine of the National League’s 15 teams are within two games of each other. Jenga towers are built of sterner stuff.

At the bottom of that jumble are this weekend’s hosts, the Reds, somehow 13th in the NL and in the thick of it at the same time. Enjoying Boston’s newfound embrace of swiping bases? Cincinnati leads baseball with 107, 31 more than the American League leaders, Elly De La Cruz leading an even wider array of speedsters than Boston’s via almost nightly absurdity.

Walk, steal second, score when a pickoff throw gets into center field. As one does when not throwing 100-m.p.h. rockets across the infield.

Suffice to say, I’m selling the idea there are Red Sox games to genuinely look forward to this weekend. And that’s before reminding the Red Sox are playing some of their best baseball of the season.

The form is again familiar: Boston leads the majors in offensive stats both traditional (.294 batting average) and new age (.366 weighted on-base) in June. (They’re third in runs per game behind the Mets and Baltimore.)

The surge comes after a change to their pregame preparations prior to last month’s sweep of the Rays at Tropicana Field, Alex Cora’s club ditching its traditional team-wide hitters’ meetings for a more individualized approach.

“It’s more like a one-on-one conversation,” the manager told WEEI on Wednesday. “Every hitter is different. It’s such a young group, we felt like we needed to be more specific. . . . ‘[Ceddanne] Rafaela, who’s developing, this is what we need you to do.’

“It’s been fun to watch. For example, Jarren Duran. Before the game, they go over the gameplan. After the game, they go over the game. Did you execute? Did you hunt pitches where you wanted?”

The offense that couldn’t deliver anything in the clutch for weeks has seven 10-hit games in the last eight. (The eighth, last Friday’s loss to the Yankees, they forced 104 pitches from New York’s Luis Gil in five innings.) And it’s coming from everywhere — literally, in the case of the Toronto series, where all 13 Sox to get a plate appearance had at least one hit.

Rafaela, 5 for 7 to lead the team sitting for a game. Seven barrels from Rafael Devers. Three homers from Tyler O’Neill. Seven more stolen bases from the speed quartet — Duran, Rafaela, David Hamilton, Romy Gonzalez — we talked about Monday.

It feels, as the good times usually do, like something is building. The roller coaster’s churning up. And if you’re really taking the ride, include the pieces marinating and learning in Portland, “where an uber-talented pool of young talent is continuing to thrive against Double-A competition” to quote colleague Conor Ryan.

Hope is fun. Hope should not be waved off when the humidity’s this close to 80 percent, nor when there are hours of sun-baked, parade day frivolity between now and first pitch.

Those Blue Jays we just saw, however, force some perspective.

Those of you close to Manchester and the New Hampshire Fisher Cats remember what I’m talking about. It was 2018 when that was the Double-A place to be in New England. Vlad Guerrero Jr., at 19, slamming 14 home runs in a 61-game cameo. Cavan Biggio and Bo Bichette sticking around after he was promoted, with 26 homers and 43 doubles in respective full seasons.

They were all coming, and they were a pending problem. The cornerstone on which a big-market team it’s easy to forget is a big-market team would build another perennial contender.

The second-generation trio was all in the majors by the following August. The Jays went from 67 wins to the wild-card series in the upheaval of 2020, to Guerrero nearly winning AL MVP in 2021 while Bichette led the league in hits and the Jays led the league in homers.

When that team missed the playoffs by a game, it was a lament, but Jordan Romano and Alek Manoah were emerging. The lineup was solid. There would be other chances.

They’ve come and gone, the Jays swept out of the wild-card series each of the last two years. This year, sub .500 for going on two months and miles behind the Yankees and Orioles, they traded Biggio to the Dodgers. Guerrero has regressed each successive year. Bichette has battled injury. The bullpen has struggled.

Toronto looked like the Red Sox at their worst on Wednesday, committing four errors and going 1 for 15 with runners in scoring position. We’ve seen turnaround are possible from that, but six years from it feeling like a renaissance was coming, it’s yet to really arrive.

“This team needs to start stringing wins together or risk being sold off for parts,” Gregor Chisholm wrote in the Toronto Star this week. “Front-office executives or coaches, maybe both, will start losing jobs.”

The ride is ending before it really ever took off.

Let’s be charitable and call it a 2030 problem here. For that matter, given three last-place finishes in four years, three brushouts in the wild-card series would actually be progress.

These Red Sox are on a run, literal and figurative. The sort that could make it three straight years of annoyance they didn’t do more at the trade deadline, but even that’s a problem for the future.

The New England sports stage is theirs once the duck boats park on Friday afternoon, and they’re still worth watching. When the future’s perennially uncertain, it’s important to take the wins wherever you can find them.